What makes ARRI Rental unique?
With ARRI celebrating its 100-year anniversary next year, that history brings a tremendous depth of knowledge and longstanding customer relationships. To have an ownership that has been in the same family since the very beginning brings a continuity and understanding that is totally unique. Although ARRI Rental is not in itself 100 years old, being part of the ARRI Group gives us access to that history, culture and understanding.

Has the ALEXA 65 changed people’s perceptions of ARRI Rental?
Yes, I think it has, along with some other initiatives we’ve undertaken.

Until a few years ago, each ARRI rental operation around the world had a different brand – ARRI CSC, ARRI Media, ARRI Rental Deutschland etc. It was a collection of well run businesses, but more of a loose confederation than a unified and connected global group.

The name change to ARRI Rental for each of our businesses is an outward sign that we are now a much more integrated global group. However, the big changes have happened internally. We made the commitment back in 2012 that we wanted to better serve our customers as they travelled around the world as part of the increasingly global film & TV industry. We wanted them to feel that whether it was Berlin, London or Atlanta, the ARRI Rental sign above the door would signal the same high level of service and technology.

Also, we wanted to move from being a rental company to a rental company that innovates technology. We wanted to develop customized and specialist technology that wasn’t easily available elsewhere to support our creative clients. The ALEXA 65 was the first significant project with that intention.

ARRI had talked about this for a long time but decided it just wasn’t viable as a sales product. It would be very expensive to develop (and therefore sell) and also required new lenses and workflow to make it a complete system. In late 2012 ARRI Rental evaluated the project and decided to take a massive leap and exclusively fund and commission its development as a rental only camera system.

We wanted to maintain the dynamic range, color imagery and all the other successful features of the ALEXA. But we also wanted to add as much resolution as possible, to scale it up and to revisit a format ARRI had already brought to market 25 years ago with the Arriflex 765.

We wanted to have a true 65mm sensor – a digital successor to the larger film formats of 65mm and Vistavision. Size matters and a larger real estate, giving as much resolution as possible, was our aim – still utilizing the same pixels as the standard ALEXA, but a lot more of them.

In fact, our original prediction at the start of the project was that we were developing a digital version of a Vistavision film camera which would be primarily used for VFX, large vista shots, landscapes – where resolution was critical. However, as the ALEXA 65 has exactly the same image characteristics as a standard ALEXA, the majority of the 30 feature films that have used the ALEXA 65 so far have also used it as the Main Unit A-camera.

Crucially, for us this was never just about a camera; it’s a camera system. We took on the task of developing a 65mm lens program that covered the full sensor with our partner IBE. Those lenses have been very successful and we are now in the process of developing more new lens systems and reworking older glass to give a full range of optics.

And of course, we worked closely with Codex for the development of a Codex Vault, which not only manages regular ARRIRAW but also handles the large amount of ALEXA 65 RAW data.

It is a complete package, which could only be brought about by a technology collaboration between ARRI Rental, ARRI R&D, Codex and IBE. Also, ARRI Rental announced in 2015 a collaborative venture with IMAX. ARRI Rental and IMAX are jointly developing a customized ALEXA 65 for use on IMAX productions - a natural successor to IMAX’s rich heritage of 15-perf 65mm filmmaking.

I think this has been the most important factor that has changed the perception of ARRI Rental – that we can innovate and work with world-class technology partners to make small-volume, complex technology available to our clients.

Has the camera rental business changed in the last few years?
That’s a good question. Certainly the development of digital single-sensor camera systems has democratized the business, with many new camera rental companies emerging over the past five years. Competition is fiercer than ever and also the range of technology available is growing every year.

This makes it an ever-more challenging environment for us. We have to integrate rapidly changing and diverse technology into our business – making sure that all our staff members are fully trained and that we have the appropriate test equipment and systems.

Also, the business is more geographically diverse and mobile than ever, with global production hotspots appearing and disappearing mainly due to the competitiveness of local tax incentives and currency movements. We are responding to that with local, professional support solutions for our clients.

However, even with all this change, for ARRI Rental the fundamentals still remain the most important for our future: well-trained and motivated employees, an entrepreneurial spirit, strong, loyal partnerships and a fierce commitment to the continuous development of new technologies.

What does the future hold for ARRI Rental?
The last four years have been quite a journey for us; consolidating and improving our businesses around the world, opening new offices, bringing aboard new talented employees and developing new camera, workflow and lens systems.

The next four years will be much the same and will build on this; we plan to open further offices and with support from our partners, really establish ARRI Rental as a technology leader.

With the development of the ALEXA 65, we have seen an enthusiastic embracing of large format cinematography that has not been easily available in the digital world until now. The format esthetic, the resolution and the wide choice of optics we believe will continue to be popular – especially as the management of the large files it produces becomes easier and easier. This will continue to be a substantial development for us and we will create systems that can be available to a wide range of productions – not just big budget, VFX-heavy feature films.

However, the most important aspect of the future is continuing to attract dynamic and experienced new employees to join our team and to help support this growth. Technology and our people have to develop hand-in-hand for us to have success in the future. We also visited ARRI Rental’s facility in Secaucus, New Jersey where we met Chris MacKarell and Lynn “Gus” Gustafson. Both were heavily involved in the development and roll out of the ALEXA 65 and the accompanying Codex workflow. Like Martin, both emphasized the combination of people and technology that underlies ARRI Rental and has made the ALEXA 65 so successful. Chris, one of ARRI Rental’s workflow experts, explained that without a streamlined, reliable workflow, the ALEXA 65 would not be successful. Codex had proven themselves with the ALEXA XT and so were the natural choice. Codex Vault had the horsepower to keep up with the approximately 2.6 TB hour needed. Chris and Gus both also wanted to mention the contribution of the late Bill Lovell, an early champion of the ALEXA 65 project, who sadly passed away before his vision was realized. 

When did ARRI ask Codex to become involved with the ALEXA 65?
It must be over 2 years ago I first had discussions with Franz Kraus about how a digital 65mm camera would make the format much more accessible. Things got serious at Camerimage 2012 when I discussed the idea further with the late Bill Lovell from ARRI Media who was very excited about this camera system. My last conversation with Bill was about the camera. 

Have you always been interested in the 65mm format?      
As you know, I am a big movie fan and some of the most iconic movies of all time that happen to also be my favourite movies – 2001: A Space Odyssey – for example, have been captured with this format. As I’ve observed the transition from film to digital from up-close, I’ve hoped that digital capture would aim to match the image quality of this amazing film format. It was a shame that technical and budget reasons stopped this format being used more often. The ALEXA 65 system will change that.  

Are there particular movies you would encourage people to see in order to appreciate it?
The obvious choices are 2001, Lawrence of Arabia and Ben-Hur. I’d also encourage people to see Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, shot by Vittorio Storaro ASC. It wasn’t all shot with 65mm but I think the format was used to great effect for certain scenes. And then of course recently there’s been The Dark Knight Rises and The Master. 

You talk to a lot of cinematographers – what do you think will be the response to this camera?
I think for many it’s the digital camera they’ve been waiting for. I was talking to Bob Richardson ASC recently – he’s shooting with 65mm film on a project right now. He said “I can not express how enthusiastic I am about the forthcoming ALEXA 65 - I am currently working with 65 film and if the quality is any where near that of film we will all benefit from the increased information and quality of image.” This I think just about sums up what people will think.

What were the challenges, if any, in being involved with this project?
Fortunately at Codex we’ve been working with large files since the company started – one of the first cameras we supported was the Dalsa Origin 4K. For the ALEXA 65 camera, the RAW files are 31 MB per frame. The data rate is 733 MB/s. So obviously we needed a robust recording format with solid state drives that were rock solid in sustaining the required data rates, at frame rates of up to 60 FPS. This put us close to the cutting edge of technology but it’s a place we are absolutely comfortable being. The recording media we created for the ALEXA XT, the Capture Drive, is robust and available. 

How important was it to Codex and ARRI to build on existing tools and formats – Codex Capture Drives, Codex Vault, the ARRIRAW format?
Really, really important. Our customers and users would expect nothing less from us. The ARRIRAW format has become standard and productions and post houses are comfortable using it. Codex workflows have become standard and so there will be no learning curve as this camera rolls out to productions. As Neil Fanthom from the ARRI Rental Group says, “the uncompressed 65mm imaging format of the ALEXA 65 demands a high performance, cost-effective workflow to ensure that post production processes and budgets are kept under control.” Given our history of collaboration plus Codex’s widespread adoption, ARRI were confident that Codex could provide this. And we’ve strived to provide some standardization so that a new camera like the ALEXA 65 doesn’t mean re-inventing the wheel. 

In the quest for next generation cinema, what’s more important – resolution, dynamic range or high frame rates? Or are all required?
These are all tools that cinematographers and directors can use to tell better stories. In a perfect world we would have all of these things and the plan is to provide a continuous development program that allows us to improve as we go. Of course we also have others to consider for a next generation camera, the requirements of visual effects are extremely important now, filmmaking is about collaboration. We also have many more delivery platforms to support now, from smart phones to higher resolution displays. Cinema has some fantastic new display technologies coming soon. Dolby Vision, for example, requires cameras like the ALEXA 65 to bring a better experience to the viewer. 

What about workflow? How important is it that the camera is backed up by a rock-solid workflow? 
It’s absolutely critical. At Codex we’ve focused on providing reliable workflows for digital cameras and this is no exception. In fact, with the data requirements of this camera, workflow is even more important. DPs understand this - Bob Richardson told me that the Vault Lab 65 is vital for the workflow. We’ve spent years developing reliable workflows so that filmmakers can be confident that their digital negative is secure. Modern filmmaking requires a solid technology background, when you are capturing multiple terabytes per day you need to plan – producers need to know the digital negative is safe and post support for production is making a massive change from the past. New systems need new solutions with the same guarantees you would expect from a lab in the past.